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During a 2008 CBS60 Minutes interview, Al Gore, who was launching a major global warming crisis advertising campaign at the time, responded to a question by Leslie Stahl about skeptics stating, “I think those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view. They’re almost like the ones who still believe that the Moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the world is flat.” So wouldn’t you expect that some of those people who actually witnessed the Earth from orbit and walked on the Moon… those “flat-Earthers” … to know better than to question the scientific basis for his alarmist climate claims? Well, apparently, this just isn’t the case.

Seven Apollo astronauts, along with two former NASA Johnson Space Center directors and several former senior management-level technical experts, have recently lodged formal complaints to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Jr. regarding the dismal and embarrassing state of the agency’s climate science programs. These charges were presented in two separate letters that were hand-delivered, then publicly released.

The first letter, dated April 10, admonished the agency for its role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change, while neglecting basic empirical evidence that calls the theory into question. The group also charged that NASA in general, and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in particular, has failed to make an objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change, and is relying too heavily upon complex climate models that have proven to be scientifically inadequate for climate predictions. It specifically asked that GISS, headed by Dr. James Hansen, be required to “refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites.”

The second letter, dated May 11, took issue with formal statements by NASA Chief Scientist Dr. Waleed Abdalati, which contradicted a response he had made to the first letter that: “As an agency, NASA does not draw conclusions and issue ‘claims’ about research findings.” Yet only eight days later, Abdalati testified at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing that the sea level was projected to rise between 0.2 meters and 2 meters within the next 87 years. He said that the lower ranges were less likely, and that “…the highest values are based on warmest of the temperature scenarios commonly considered for the remainder of the 21stcentury.” He added: “The consequences of a 1 meter rise in sea level by the end of this century would be very significant in terms of human well-being and economics, and potentially global socio-political stability.”

The second letter from NASA retirees observed that the range of Abdalati’s conclusion is “astounding”, and “…if hard data points to a probable rise, it should be stated with its probability. Can you imagine one of your predecessors, Dr. Thomas Paine, declaring, ‘Our Apollo 11 Lunar Lander’s target is the sea of Tranquility [in the Moon’s equatorial region], but we may make final descent within a range that included Crater Clavius [near the South Pole]?’” The letter then urged Administrator Bolden to make a commitment to equal or exceed, “…the agency’s reputation for careful reliance upon rigorous science.” It asked him to “Join us, please, in encouraging your colleagues to achieve the level of excellence the world has come to expect from America’s National Aeronautics Administration!” Expressing the need for urgency, the letter ended with: “Waiting is not an option!”

Dr. Abdalati’s Senate testimony included a qualifying statement on a subject that is typically missed or ignored in climate science media reporting and policy deliberations… namely that all those projections are based upon theoretical models that simply cannot be validated or trusted. He admitted, to wit: “The modeling activity is an integrated effort jointly carried out by NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy (DOE). NSF also invests in basic observations and process studies that are either directly coordinated with or are complementary to NASA’s activities, and DOE is building dynamical models of Greenland and Antarctica, where future sea level rise projections take advantage of observations provided by NASA and NSF. Through these investments and activities, the scientific community is making progress toward addressing the wild-card of the sea level rise equation, but we are still a ways off from a level of understanding that would allow us to predict future changes accurately [italics added]”.

One signatory of the NASA letters, Dr. Tom Wysmuller, developed polynomial regression algorithms (coding) used by climate scientists and modelers. As he pointed out to me: “Weather and climate comprise the sum total of an almost infinite series of interactive events occurring on a molecular and atomic level. Climate models involve particularly massive large scale approximations, which is why their predictions are less than robust.”

Yes, models are, indeed, still a very long way off from any ability to accurately predict such climate-related changes. Even the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2001 Summary Report for Decision Makers chapter titled Model Evaluation contains this confession: “We fully recognize that many of the evaluation statements we make contain a degree of subjective scientific perception and may contain much ‘community’ or ‘personal’ knowledge. For example, the very choice of model variables and model processes that are investigated are often based upon subjective judgment and experience of the modeling community.”

In that same report, the IPCC further admits: “In climate research and modeling, we should realize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and lead author of 2001 and 2007 IPCC report chapters, has also admitted that IPCC models have failed to duplicate realities. Writing in a 2007 “Predictions of Climate” blog appearing in the science journal Nature.com he stated, “None of the models used by the IPCC are initialized to the observed state, and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed state”.

Doesn’t that pretty much say it all?

One might imagine that if any organization can be trusted for reliable climate information, it would be NASA, especially the NASA organization named after Dr. Robert H. Goddard who is widely recognized as the “Father of American Rocketry”. Yet it is important to understand that the Goddard Institute for Space Studies relies primarily upon surface (not satellite) data that is mostly supplied by others. And even some top NASA scientists consider the dataset produced by GISS inferior to data provided by two other principal organizations, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climate Data Center Global Historical Climatology Network, and the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU)… home of the famous “ClimateGate” e-mail scandal.